The Limits of Consciousness

General Aspects of Consciousness

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This series of theoretical and practical investigations aims to present, in a first, simple approach, three central aspects of consciousness in Homo sapiens, which are deeply rooted in modern thought and have key consequences in the development of human revolution, understood as a process of general self-transformation.

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The central question here is what is the relationship between consciousness and such social self-transformation, as a result of the interaction of "revolutionary" elements and "conservative" elements.  I will try to show how these latter elements not only play an overwhelming role of revolution within the theories and policies promoted by the ruling class, but also how they have become embedded in the theories and policies of the exploited classes, imprinting an a priori limitation on any truly revolutionary process.

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It is organized into three objectives that reflect, separately, three levels of complexity of the question of consciousness, beginning with the most general and ending with a particular example.  This will serve as a substrate for the methodological discussion about the approach to consciousness.

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The first objective (The conceptual extraction of homo sapiens from Nature) shows how the dissociation - at the level of consciousness - of the "human being" from the rest of nature is a methodological consequence of dragging anthropocentric axioms that place our "species" as the internal reference point of all theory-practice. It is precisely the axiomatic character of these propositions that is so deeply rooted in philosophy, politics, science and popular thought that is under discussion. Far from being demonstrated, and in spite of the fact that innumerable evidences have been accumulated against them, they continue in force, playing a completely anti-revolutionary role, even within the theories of the left. In the end, this imposes an enormous limitation on overcoming the problems of our world population and, therefore, on the revolution, providing conservative and dogmatic elements to the Theories of the Revolution, and preventing the development of superior and creative approaches.
 

The second objective (the dissociation between the individual and the social)  is located in the false discussion between biological and social determinism, and therefore, it is in conflict with any discipline and/or theory that tries to explain the aspects of consciousness from reductionist elements. Whatever the point of departure, both determinisms are developed on the basis of a logic or monocausal method, arbitrarily disregarding - a priori of any demonstration - elements that conflict with the coherence of the theory on which they are based. All determinism is nothing more than a methodological reductionism, with a load of idealism, and frequently, with an ideological substrate.
The dissociation between the individual and the social is but one particular example, of high susceptibility in modern thought, both academic and popular, of a relationship between different levels of organization.  The reactionary thing, put in evidence here, is no longer in general terms the conceptual separation of the human with the natural, but particularly, the (conceptual) separation of the individual from the properly specific (the species, the population) at the same time that the specific (the social) acquires a determinist character on the individual.  The recurrent justification of social determinism (which is rarely presented as such) is as opposed to biological determinism. However, in addition to operational reductionism, both share, in general terms, a common origin: the conceptual separation between the biological and the social, not only understood as a categorical separation of objects of study of different scientific disciplines, but rather as a pair of ontological opposites defining the strictly human.  It is from here, from ontological dualism, that the "religious" concept of Man as a rational, social and cultural being is constructed.

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Some of these aspects were developed in the document entitled "Questions on General Aspects of Consciousness".
 

Finally, the third objective (The Question of Gender from the Intra-Specific Rupture), discusses the relationship between the sexes (and conceptually, of the genera) as an example of an intra-specific relationship (that is, between individuals of the same species).  The reduction to opposite categories (male-female; male-female; male-female) - a mechanism that operates at the conceptual level, that is, at the level of consciousness - plays a role in how the question of gender is thought of and the consequent political action; and above all, in the modulation of intergovernmental relations.  Far from polemicizing with any policy that aims at conquering conditions of equity between "genders", this line of work seeks to open the discussion about the ontogeny of social relations (in particular, in this example, about individuals of different "sexes").  The problems discussed in the previous points are once again brought together here, in order to discuss the positions that deny the (wide diversity of) sexuality, either by transforming it operationally into crude categorical dichotomies (male-female; heterosexual-homosexual; monogamous-polygamous), or by replacing these dichotomies with a (larger but always limited) number of categorical or stereotypical ones. The risk that masks this mechanism is to pose the solution in terms of opposition between the "genders" (more specifically, between individuals) who suffer the same evolutionary and historical (social and cultural) constraints, and who would therefore benefit equally from transcending those constraints. This third objective is being developed in internal relation with the following own line: Sex/Gender Perception

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